Between 1939 and 1941, when Britten and Auden conceived and produced Paul Bunyan, there was a decided lack of consensus among American composers and critics regarding what “American-ness” in music entailed. This chapter addresses the debate in the late 1930s and early 1940s over the notions of a distinctly American style in art music and examines the complicated relationship of Britten and W. H. Auden with Americanness in Paul Bunyan, the work Britten thought his most American. One tendency of American composers, among many, was to embrace a musical isolationism that was steeped in nationalism and favored American-born composers over imports. This intensely nativistic approach would have hardly provided a fertile soil for a Briton's approach to Americanism, despite nods to such jingoistic American fare as jazz and folk music in the work. But neither did Britten's Paul Bunyan conform entirely to a movement toward European models, traditional or experimental, thought by many the best means by which American composers could gain an international stature commensurate with that of their European colleagues. Although in the majority of his works written during this time Britten best fit within the anti-nationalist, non-experimental composers, his approach in Bunyan was too eclectic to find a refuge in that quarter. In many respects, Britten's and Auden's Paul Bunyan could not be more American, but their perception of America failed to carve out a singular niche within the prevailing notions of American identity, musical or otherwise. Indeed, Britten's music runs the gamut of the contemporary debate from nationalism to experimentalism, while Auden's libretto explores high and low styles from Broadway, radio, and the serious stage. Despite Britten's and Auden's efforts to create a work that would garner entry into the American cultural scene with a conscious expression of a decidedly American sense of self, their Paul Bunyan was not fully American by virtue of the nationality of its creators, nor wholly foreign because of its subject matter and musical content. Britten's and Auden's attempts to express American-ness situate the work squarely within – and yet still outside – the contemporary musical atmosphere of the United States.

In July 1964 Britten accepted the inaugural award from the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies for his work in music, and Faber & Faber, who had recently welcomed him as their first house composer, marked the occasion by publishing his acceptance speech. “We are all very pleased that you have agreed to our bringing out your excellent Aspen speech,” wrote Faber Head of Music Donald Mitchell, “a really first-rate statement, I thought, which said so many things that have needed saying for a long while.” But Mitchell initially thought the title, On Receiving the First Aspen Award, presented a slight problem. “Obviously the Aspen Award must come into it,” he granted, “but I would prefer to have this as a sub-title to one more general and immediately musical. Have you any strong feelings about this? If not, Tony [Gishford] and I will think about it and hope for an inspiration that matches the text.”

After some deliberation, Faber eventually settled on the title “The Composer's Place,” to the point of publishing a draft of the speech under that heading. It was a plausible suggestion, for it could be argued that this title described Britten's core belief that a musician's place within society was primarily to be of use to people, to please them, to “enhance their lives.” But the title could have as easily described the circumstances and environment essential, from Britten's perspective, to achieving these goals. According to Britten, his own journey toward the composer's place was facilitated by a number of significant factors such as routine, stability, and lasting friendship: what he described as “roots,” “associations,” “backgrounds,” and “personal relationships” were all essential to enabling him to work comfortably and without distraction. The last of these conditions must have taken on an added meaning, for, at the time of writing his speech, the relationship with his former publisher, initiated when he was a recent graduate of the Royal College of Music (RCM), had, for what must be recognized as a variety of reasons, dissolved.

This essay is an attempt to gain further understanding of Britten's particular reworking, or reconception, of tonality through an examination of his use of one of its most distinctive constructs, the augmented-sixth chord. The topic was prompted initially by Derrick Puffett's claim in an article on the String Quartet No. 2 by Britten's contemporary Michael Tippett that, in contrast with Tippett in the movement Puffett analyzes, “Britten […] is not noted for his fondness for augmented sixths.” Puffett is correct that Britten is not well known for this, but wrong in his assumption that he shouldn't be. In fact, if one searches merely the output preceding his first opera, Peter Grimes (1945), one can find at least eight works in which the augmented sixth has a significant structural role.

In his book A Chord in Time: The Evolution of the Augmented Sixth from Monteverdi to Mahler, Mark Ellis suggests that the origins of the “group of chords” later to be labeled as the Italian, French, and German sixths “can be detected in the rapidly changing musical worlds of the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.” Debated by theorists from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the augmented-sixth chord, an entity that is itself essentially unstable, can be thought of historically as a still point in an increasingly rapidly turning musical world, maintaining its essential behavior through most of the history of notated music – across a greater period of time, in fact, than tonality itself and the chord that it most resembles in actual sound, the dominant seventh (Ellis's earliest example is by Ma doulce by Simon de Hasprois, who lived c.1350–1428). In harmony textbooks the augmented sixth is usually introduced after discussion of the applied dominant and the chromatic diminished seventh, and close to the Neapolitan chord (it falls, of course, under the category of chromatic pre-dominant). Aldwell and Schachter, for instance, place it in a section entitled “Part VI Dissonance and Chromaticism II,” after “The Phrygian II (Neapolitan)” and before “Other Chromatic Chords.” Most of their examples from real music are drawn from the Classical period (there are ten from Mozart, four from Haydn, and five from Beethoven), with a few from the Romantics, who are more prominent when inversions and “Motion to goals other than V” are introduced, and, especially, when the enharmonic potential of the German sixth is discussed.

In 1976, journalist Martin Cooper from The Telegraph proclaimed, “No composer is more English than Britten,” while marveling at the composer's “uncanny ability to identify himself with other cultures.” Still, it came as a surprise to many critics when Britten decided to open the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival with Paul Bunyan, an American operetta co-written with W. H. Auden. Although it had been whispered about for years – at the 1945 premiere of Peter Grimes, rumors circulated that this was not Britten's first opera – the work had not been published or staged since its failed New York premiere. Now promoted as a musical, Paul Bunyan was greeted with benevolent amusement by the press; as one journalist put it, “‘an American Britten’ is a boggling thought.” Similarly, scholarship on the revival of Paul Bunyan has tended to consider Britten's return to the operetta as less of a serious artistic endeavor and more of a pet project, motivated by the same personal considerations that inspired him to undertake the revision of his juvenilia toward the end of his life. But this treatment of Paul Bunyan – and of so many of Britten's revised works – overlooks how the composer carefully curated these reborn pieces, presenting them in particular venues, publications, and media in ways that helped to consolidate his reputation in his later years. During the 1960s and 1970s – a period when Britten is said to have retreated to Aldeburgh – these supposedly personal utterances were part of a larger intervention into present-day culture. Using Paul Bunyan as a case study, this chapter traces how, for Britten, revision was not just a musical process, but also a historical practice, whereby the composer sought to involve himself in contemporary debates about the development of music and theater, all the while setting the terms of his legacy.

Britten's former collaborator and co-creator of Paul Bunyan, W. H. Auden, once reflected that “what every author hopes to receive from posterity – a hope usually disappointed – is justice.” In revising Paul Bunyan in the twilight of his life, Britten showed us how he wished to be remembered.

Britten was famously skeptical where words about music were concerned. Unlike his near contemporary Michael Tippett, he found that words about his own music or that of other composers did not come easily to him, and he was a reluctant writer and speaker about music, especially in later life. There are, of course, notable exceptions, not the least of which is his On Receiving the First Aspen Award. But from the outset, music was – and was to remain – his chief mode of expression, his means of communication with the world; it was through music, writing or performing it, that he articulated his ideas. Words about music were not really for him. That was the position Britten was content to be understood by the world at large. The truth, however, is rather more nuanced.

When he was a young composer in London during the 1930s, Britten's general antipathy about the value of writing about music were certainly fuelled by the attitude of certain music critics toward his work. Not all were hostile by any means; but among some there was a distinct view that this brilliantly gifted young man needed taking down a peg or two. The description of his music as being “clever” began to take form as a mantra to be chanted at the appearance of each new work. The thin-skinned, hypersensitive Britten was bruised by their words; as a consequence he mistrusted most critics and critical writing thereafter. In his view, there were very few critics whose opinions of his music were worth a great deal. They were a necessary evil, one at best to be tolerated.

Ironically, at the same time as he was receiving a mixed press for his music in 1930s, Britten was giving full critical vent to his own thoughts about music, old and new, in his diaries and letters. His diaries, more so than his letters, are full of immediate, unguarded responses to the wide range of music he heard in the concert hall, and on the radio and gramophone recordings – and he listened more than most. Performers were praised or dismissed; composers, likewise; early musical enthusiasms developed into lifelong passions (Mozart, Mahler) or eventually dismissed (Brahms, Beethoven).

In 1926, Benjamin Britten's father submitted an orchestral “Ouverture” by his twelve-year-old son to the BBC's Autumn Musical Festival Prize Competition. The competition was an initial attempt by the young British Broadcasting Company, then only in its fourth year, to increase the number of first performances in its concert broadcasts; it was planned jointly with the recently formed music department of Oxford University Press. This competition was a prime opportunity for this young composer, this broadcaster, and this publisher – setting out on their respective journeys at around the same time – to secure their footing in their respective spheres, and to gain public recognition and acclaim. Prizes were offered for works in six different genres, the top prize for an overture being set at L150. The entries were judged by some of the most eminent British composers of the day. The results were announced in the Radio Times of 24 December 1926, just a week before the BBC was reorganized as a corporation. There had been 240 entries, and, rather surprisingly, “in not one of the classes was there a single work which reached the standard meriting the important prizes offered. The judges felt that the B.B.C. would be doing harm rather than good to British music if they awarded prizes to works which did not merit them.” There was no separate consideration of children's works, and Britten's overture apparently went unnoticed. This was an inauspicious first contact between the budding composer and the young broadcaster. Nevertheless, they were to have a long and mutually beneficial collaboration, which would have profound impact not only on Britten's career and on the BBC's musical trajectory over forty years, but – perhaps more importantly – on the radically changing concept in the twentieth century of what it meant to be a “professional” composer.

During the years when Britten was first developing and then honing his compositional skills, there are many references in his diaries to listening to the wireless, with notes of his responses to works by Delius, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Holst, and many other composers of the day. Once the BBC Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1930, the Corporation had a truly fine instrument with which it regularly broadcast orchestral trends of the past and the present. Britten was among the first generation of composers who were able to hear as a daily occurrence professional performances of music in all genres.

From his first meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich and Dmitri Shostakovich in 1960 to his death in 1976, Britten maintained a close personal connection with Soviet musicians and audiences. In the late 1950s, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom sought to reduce Cold War tensions by developing cultural exchanges between each other's nations; Britten was a major participant in these exchanges. Britten's biographers have focused primarily on the composer's friendships with prominent Soviet musicians such as Rostropovich and Shostakovich, as well as the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. In this chapter, I discuss an aspect of Britten's relationship with the Soviet Union that has been largely neglected: the composer's ultimately successful attempts in forging a compromise between his publishers and the Union so that fully staged performances of Peter Grimes, Op. 33 (1945), and The Prince of the Pagodas, Op. 57 (1956), could take place in Leningrad's Kirov Theater.

There are four critical moments that define Britten's attitude toward the Soviet performance of his staged works: Britten's 1961 letter to Hamilton Kerr of the Foreign Office, the Kirov Theater's revival of Peter Grimes in 1965, the Soviet premiere of The Prince of the Pagodas in 1972, and the composer's reaction to the Soviet Union's entrance into the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) in 1973. In order to reveal a new perspective on these circumstances, I have consulted the composer's unpublished correspondence at the Britten-Pears Foundation Archives in Aldeburgh as well as recently declassified British Foreign Office and Board of Trade documents held by the British National Archives. These documents reveal that Britten forged personal relationships with Soviet musicians to promote performances of his compositions in the Soviet Union, with disregard to the rights issues they would invariably raise with his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. Acknowledging Britten's efforts to overcome the obstacles resulting from promoting performances of his works in the Soviet Union, the reader may develop a clearer understanding of his priorities concerning cultural exchange during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Britten's post-war years began an interval in which his energies were almost exclusively focused on building both an empire and the environs in which a living and vital musical establishment could flourish outside London. During the ten years immediately following Peter Grimes Britten not only composed seven of his nine full-scale operas, he also devoted himself to the founding of both the English Opera Group (EOG, 1946–47) and the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts (AFMA, 1947–48). The latter endeavors were intimately bound up in notions of English identity: the EOG had as its purpose the fostering of a native opera tradition; the Aldeburgh Festival was meant to be a quintessentially English – if not specifically East Anglian – experience, thanks in no small part to its rootedness in the Suffolk coast and the iconic shingle that framed its eastern border.

Narratives of the founding of these two entities abound in Britten scholarship, but tend to treat them either in isolation or as different but compatible. Although a recounting of the EOG's history is not complicated, its internal wranglings bear a complexity of great proportions; these are assessed at length in the biographies by Carpenter and Kildea. Likewise, the founding of the Aldeburgh Festival – if less controversial – has received its due diligence. That which has not been considered, however, is how inextricable and affined these two undertakings were. This chapter examines how the English Opera Group's founding was thoroughly enmeshed with the imminent establishment of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts. Although the EOG focused its efforts on Britten, the repertoire selections of the Aldeburgh Festival far eclipsed those of a perceived Britten-only event. In particular, the programming of the first decade of the EOG, when viewed parallel to that of the Aldeburgh Festival, reveals the extraordinary diversity and range of the Festival as weighed against the strictly narrow scope of the programming of the EOG (see Tables 4.2 and 4.3).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Ouidah was profoundly affected by the legal banning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the adjustments which this necessitated in the conduct of commerce, and by the related development of a substantial Brazilian community in the town. In the early stages of both processes, the central figure was Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave-trader who settled permanently in Ouidah in the 1820s. Unfortunately, this critical period in Ouidah's history is in many respects obscure, because of the deficiencies of the available evidence. The detailed documentation provided for the eighteenth century by the European forts ceased when these were abandoned in the early nineteenth century, and European visitors remained rare thereafter until the mid- 1840s. For the 1820s and 1830s, the most informative contemporary material is to be found in the records of judicial proceedings relating to illegal slave-ships captured by the British navy; but these provide only fragmentary (and not always reliable) information on what was going on on shore. To a greater degree than either before or after, the internal history of Ouidah in this period has therefore to be reconstructed on the basis of local oral traditions.

The legal prohibition of the slave trade

The legal banning of the slave trade was a complex and protracted process. As far as it affected Ouidah, the first important move was the abolition of slavery in French colonies by the revolutionary government in 1794, which was itself a recognition of the reality of the destruction of slavery in the principal French colony of Saint-Domingue by the slave insurrection of 1791. Although slavery was relegalized by Napoleon in 1802, the attempt to restore the institution was not effective in Saint-Domingue, serving merely to provoke the proclamation of that country's independence as the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Although French slaving revived after 1802, very few French ships seem to have called at Ouidah. The practical effect, therefore, was that what had lately been the principal market for slaves exported from Ouidah now disappeared.

Ouidah is situated in the coastal area (in the Department of Atlantique) of the modern Republic of Benin (formerly the French colony of Dahomey) in West Africa. In origin, it is an indigenous African town, which had existed long before the French colonial occupation in 1892. In the pre-colonial period, it had belonged successively to two African states, first the kingdom of Hueda (whence the name ‘Ouidah’) and from 1727 that of Dahomey, from which the French colony took its name; and the first language of its inhabitants today remains Fon, the language of Dahomey, with French inherited from the colonial period as the superimposed official language of administration and education. Today, Ouidah has a population of around 25,000, which by modern standards is quite modest, and it is dwarfed by the two leading cities of southern Benin: the official capital Porto- Novo, 60 km to the east (with a population probably around 200,000), and the commercial centre and international port of Cotonou, 40 km to the east (perhaps approaching 1,000,000).

In the precolonial period, however, Ouidah was the principal commercial centre in the region and the second town of the Dahomey kingdom, exceeded in size only by the capital Abomey, 100 km inland. In particular, it served as a major outlet for the export of slaves for the trans-Atlantic trade. The section of the African coast on which Ouidah is situated, in geographical terms the Bight (or Gulf) of Benin, was known to Europeans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the ‘Slave Coast’, from its prominence as a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade; and within this region Ouidah was by far the most important point of embarkation for slaves, far outshadowing its nearest rival, Lagos, 150 km to the east (in modern Nigeria). Ouidah was a leading slaving port for almost two centuries, from the 1670s to the 1860s. During this period, the Bight of Benin is thought to have accounted for around 22 per cent of all slaves exported to the Americas, and Ouidah for around 51 per cent of exports from the Bight.

This chapter is about “selves”: what constitutes a self, how we might locate it, and whether it is possible at all. It is also about Benjamin Britten, although while my topic is “Britten,” for the most part I shall concern myself with how the subject of “Britten” is created, communicated, absorbed, and investigated further; and shall be particularly interested in the reasons for any such investigations. My title comes from another writer's search for a musico-biographical subject: one Lady Grace Wallace, who translated Ludwig Nohl's The Life of Mozart into English and who wrote her own fervent introduction to the volume. Her preface includes the following statement within a discussion of Mozart's various genres:

Mozart inspired some extraordinary biographical outpourings, particularly in the nineteenth century, a great many of which were imbued with a sense of loss at the tragically early death of such a shining musical genius, and Lady Wallace's preface is no exception. But at the same time she does a curious thing here: she looks at the piano concertos and finds, to her mournful regret, only the ghost of Mozart. Yet she herself has killed him off by declaring it impossible that the piano concertos can truly be “heard” now that Mozart is dead. Not only have we lost Mozart: his music doesn't even stand a chance.

She may be overstating her position. But she undeniably experiences a sense of melancholy in envisaging a dead artist and his “traces” in a work; and despite his death being just over forty years ago, the same can be (and is) felt about Britten. However, unlike Mozart, whom Lady Grace could never have heard anyway (she was born some fifteen years after the composer's death), “Britten” can easily be accessed in recordings and in film. Yet even though we can hear “the man himself” in the music and in his spoken words, he is – nonetheless – no longer alive.

The British blockade of Ouidah in 1876–7 was ineffective, indeed counterproductive, in terms of its declared objectives. The attempt to intimidate the Dahomian authorities had backfired; British prestige and influence in Dahomey were weakened rather than strengthened. In fact, the most obvious and immediate consequence of the blockade was the collapse of British trade at Ouidah. In the following year, it was noted that, although Turnbull, the agent of the firm of Swanzy who had provoked the British intervention, was still resident at Ouidah, he was doing little business, because local people were afraid to be associated with him. A few years later, Swanzy sold its establishment in the English fort to a German firm, C. Goedelt of Hamburg; the transfer was announced in a letter from the German government to Glele in 1882. Thereafter, British interest in Dahomey and Ouidah effectively ceased; subsequent attempts by Dahomey to elicit British intervention, as a counterweight to the growing threat of French imperialism, came to nothing.

The British intervention also had the effect of provoking French countermeasures to assert and protect their interests in the area. In April 1878 a French officer, Paul Serval, visited Ouidah and obtained a new treaty confirming the cession of Cotonou to France. The status of this treaty, which, like that of 1868, was negotiated with the local authorities in Ouidah only, was doubtful, and it was later repudiated by Glele. But the matter was not yet put to the test, since the French, beyond stationing a Resident at Cotonou, took no immediate steps to establish effective occupation of the town, which remained under Dahomian administration. In relation to its European rivals, however, the French claim had been reasserted. The British responded by extending the territory of their own Lagos colony further westwards to occupy Ketonou, 15 km north-east of Cotonou, thus threatening communication between Cotonou and Porto-Novo, in 1879.

This concentration of French interest on Cotonou reflected in part the relative weakness of Dahomian control there, but also its increasing commercial importance and the relative decline of Ouidah.

Although in the early 1850s Dahomey had appeared to be embracing the transition from the slave trade to that in palm oil with some success, later in the decade the oil trade began to run into difficulties. Most immediately, these were caused by a fall in the world price of palm oil. The price in the UK reached a peak of ￡48 per ton in 1854, but then declined, averaging only around ￡43 during the rest of the 1850s and falling below ￡40 in the 1860s. How far this was reflected in prices paid on the African coast is unclear. As was seen in the previous chapter, the expansion of oil exports at Ouidah had been stimulated by a rise in prices to $8 per measure ($142 per ton) by 1852, and Gezo then decreed a further rise to $12 per measure ($213 per ton). By 1857, however, the price is quoted as 3 gallons to the dollar, or $6 per measure ($107 per ton) (see Table 6.1). On the face of it, therefore, prices were substantially lower from the mid-1850s; and in apparent confirmation, Burton in 1863/4 reported local complaints of ‘commercial depression’. Interpretation of these prices, however, is complicated by the depreciation of the local cowry currency, due to the importation of large quantities of the cheaper Zanzibar cowries from the 1840s onwards. Already in 1850, Forbes noted that, although the ‘head’ of 2,000 cowries still had a ‘nominal’ value of one dollar, actual silver dollars passed at between 2,400 and 2,600 cowries and cowries fell further to 5 heads for $3 (3,333 cowries to the dollar) in 1851, 2 heads (4,000) to the dollar by the beginning of 1852 and 21⁄2 heads (5,000) by 1863/4. This devaluation of cowries was reflected in an inflation of local prices: Burton in 1863/4 reported that prices in the Ouidah market had doubled during the previous ten years.

Ouidah under Dahomian rule was more than simply a site of European trade. Even in narrowly economic terms, it was also a centre for fishing and salt production, as well as for local trade, especially along the coastal lagoon. It also served, as has been seen, as a seat of Dahomian provincial administration and as a military garrison town. Nevertheless, its central function was in trade with Europeans; this is not just a Eurocentric perception, it was shared by the Dahomians themselves, as reflected in the title of the administrator of the town, Yovogan, ‘Chief of the white men’. Ouidah was a ‘white man's town’, not in the sense of being under European control but in that its principal function was as the site of trade with Europeans.

The Dahomian kings continued the policy of the earlier Hueda kings, of maintaining Ouidah as a neutral port where hostilities among Europeans were prohibited. In 1755, for example, Tegbesu sent to Ouidah to remind the directors of the European forts that ‘the road should be free and nobody should be molested while at anchor there’; in 1762, when British ships fired on a canoe delivering supplies to the French fort, he again sent to protest and to ‘desire all white men to live in friendship and let all palavers drop’. In 1791, when war with France was again threatening, the British were still confident that Ouidah would remain a safe haven, since ‘the king of Dahomey is so absolute a monarch there as never to suffer any Europeans settled in his dominions to have any controversies of any hostile nature whatever’. The policy began to break down only after 1794, when the French revolutionary government, having ended its own slave trade and thus no longer having any interest in the security of the Ouidah ‘port’, began a systematic campaign of piracy against British and Portuguese shipping at Ouidah and elsewhere on the Bight of Benin.